# Discovery of new stellar groups in the Orion complex

## TL;DR

This study applies two unsupervised machine learning algorithms to Gaia DR2 data to identify and characterize new stellar groups within the Orion complex, revealing complex sub-structures and extending our understanding of star formation.

## Contribution

The paper introduces modified SNN and an automated EnLink algorithm to detect stellar groups in Gaia data, uncovering 12 previously unknown groups in Orion.

## Key findings

- Identified 21 stellar groups in Orion, including 12 new ones.
- Groups span distances from 50 to 150 parsecs.
- Revealed complex sub-structure within the Orion OB association.

## Abstract

We test the ability of two unsupervised machine learning algorithms, \textit{EnLink} and Shared Nearest Neighbour (SNN), to identify stellar groupings in the Orion star-forming complex as an application to the 5-dimensional astrometric data from \textit{Gaia} DR2. The algorithms represent two distinct approaches to limiting user bias when selecting parameter values and evaluating the relative weights among astrometric parameters. \textit{EnLink} adopts a locally adaptive distance metric and eliminates the need of parameter tuning through automation. The original SNN relies only on human input for parameter tuning so we modified SNN to run in two stages. We first ran the original SNN 7,000 times, each with a randomly generated sample according to within-source co-variance matrices provided in \textit{Gaia} DR2 and random parameter values within reasonable ranges. During the second stage, we modified SNN to identify the most repeating stellar groups from 25,798 we obtained in the first stage. We reveal 21 spatially- and kinematically-coherent groups in the Orion complex, 12 of which previously unknown. The groups show a wide distribution of distances extending as far as about 150 pc in front of the star-forming Orion molecular clouds, to about 50 pc beyond them where we find, unexpectedly, several groups. Our results expose to view the wealth of sub-structure in the OB association, within and beyond the classical Blaauw Orion OBI sub-groups. A full characterization of the new groups is of the essence as it offers the potential to unveil how star formation proceeds globally in large complexes such as Orion. The data and code that generated the groups in this work as well as the final table can be found at \protect\url{ https://github.com/BoquanErwinChen/GaiaDR2_Orion_Dissection}.